About Stanley William Hayter

Stanley William Hayter is legendary for his technical innovations in printmaking. Initially, he experimented with adapting traditional black-and-white etching and engraving techniques to modern art aesthetics. Introduced to Surrealism in Paris through Yves Tanguy and André Masson, Hayter became associated with the movement, creating works such as Combat (1936), which depicts “a violent encounter of combatants, with leaping horses and a plethora of weapons,” as he described; Hayter drew its violent imagery from the horrors of the Spanish Civil War and the rise of Fascism. During WWII, as a member of the avant-garde living in exile in New York, his style moved toward Abstract Expressionism and, along with his theoretical writings on Automatism, would influence Jackson Pollock and other American artists. This period coincided with his perfection of a revolutionary technique for multicolor printing on a single plate.